No matter how awe-inspiring a lungfish's cakehole is, it's not going to help it move around on land.

[sanspoof]

This animation school was lunk yesterday by mefi, and although I'd seen all the 2d stuff already, I thought to myself, Self, lettuce see how their 3d stuff looks, because kids doing their thesis are probably going to be inspirationally good at such an obviously good school. And thus I looked. And in close juxtaposition, the 3d stuff looked... dead. Something was wrong. And I think I have finally worked out what it is, and it's not even complicated. Minimal deformation (in the 2d sense of outline & mass distribution change) and squash/stretch. 3d models never deform nearly as much as their 2d counterparts. And yet, they're animated similarly otherwise, and sometimes the gestures are cranked way up to compensate for lack of form change. This looks in the end like a half-finished process, where stuff sure does move fancy (and OFTEN, GOD, every damn word has to have a hand-flail), but there's no overextension of limbs to wind up an extravagant gesture, there's no head squish in wacky takes. Damn it! And ALL THIS TIME, I thought I just sucked at 3d, because I couldn't make anything look good (in my favored style). I thought that Dreamworks was hiring the wrong people, or... I don't know. But it's all in the rig. In short, you can make it move the way you want, but you can't make it change shape the way you want. Unless you have a superfancy setup.

I believe Pixar has brought in some deformation to their characters, and CERTAINLY they have in Cars. This is probably why they made it, as proof of concept for mobile form-changin' characters. So that's why everything with a budget less than Pixar Feature Film still looks like Jimmy Neutron.

Now, of course, 'hyper-realistic' game anims shouldn't probably be able to do any of this, except... maybe a little.

* Title from the dinosaur mailing list I follow.